I Told My Children Not to Eat Stuff that Fell to the Floor with Noonies Nominee Shai Almog

Hey Hackers! I’m Shai Almog and I’m the Developer Advocate @ Lightrun and co-founder of Codename One.

First of all, a huge thank you to the HackerNoon community and staff for nominating me for a 2021 Noonies award!

I’m nominated in the following categories please do check out these award pages and vote:

I’ve been a Java hacker since practically the first beta. I started writing articles teaching Java around 97-98. I was (and still am) very active in the Java communities including being one of the early members of the JavaLobby etc. all of this led me to Sun Microsystems where I worked on mobile Java and open-source mobile development tools.

As such my career ran in two parallel paths. I worked on developer tools for the next two decades within Sun, Codename One and Lightrun. I also worked on community building during all those years. But only recently have I come to the realization that I’ve effectively been a developer advocate to some degree for a very long time.

Early in my career, I was working as a game developer building a flight simulator for EA. One of my friends was so excited to work on such a cool project. I was just as excited as I was at my previous job writing heuristic scheduling solutions. My passion is the coding itself and as such developer tools, languages and advocacy are the things I’m truly excited about. I’m excited when I help other developers, I feel that I had a small part in building thousands of software products through my tools and support.

1. What do you do and why do you do it?

I currently hold two jobs. While both are in radically different segments of our industry they have many common threads. At the core, I do developer support, blogging and community outreach. I think supporting developers is a core tenant of any product whether it’s paid or free/open source.

I’m still a hacker at heart though. I joined Lightrun as the first non-founder and wrote the first server, plugin and CLI implementations. I also wrote a significant amount of the Codename One source code as well as many other projects. I think developer support requires a person who “knows the job” as such I need to be a hacker in practice and can’t leave my code behind.

In fact, I’m using my annual vacation time from Lightrun to create a new project.

2. Tell us more about the things you create / write / manage / build!

Today I work for Lightrun where we re-invented the debugger so it can be used in production environments securely. This was a very challenging task that included re-imagining everything we think about when we think about debugging. The tasks included IDE plugin development (for IntelliJ/IDEA and VSCode), CLI tool, communication framework, a Server backend and runtime agents. Getting all these different pieces to play nicely together when building a project from scratch and shipping it within months, was a major challenge.

We’re now at the growth/scale phase. This brings with it very different challenges that are also very interesting. At Codename One we built a complete cross-platform mobile framework that works natively on all mobile devices and supports Java/Kotlin. We also integrated a cloud build framework to alleviate the need of local builds. We integrated this with all 3 major Java IDEs through dedicated plugins. This was later moved to a maven plugin and external control center.

We also have two GUI builders, CSS support simulator and much more… This is all open source and has been from day one.

3. How did you end up on your current career path? Do you like it?

I programmed my Sinclair and VIC20 as a 5-year-old, following up to an Apple II in my early childhood. So the basic attraction to the field was deep. In high school, I focused on computers and even got to do some COBOL on the venerable PDP-11 as well as many other things.

It was then that I started programming professionally working for anyone who would hire me. I never really stopped working during my studies or even the military draft.

Initially, I was deeply drawn to AI and was obsessed with agents/machine vision which was the AI fad at the time. After the military, I got a job at a company doing heuristic search systems which is an AI niche. I wanted to go deeper. To get agents and the type of scale we needed I knew we needed distributed systems. So I was already pretty deep into CORBA when Java came out. I fell in love with the language… At the time I was using Slackware Linux and dual booting with OS/2… So I started writing for one of the early e-zines for OS/2 users/developers called EDM/2. My initial writing was sub-par but that early work helped me find my voice as a writer and become more prolific in the following years.

A company in my area recruited me based on my AI and CORBA background promising me a big satellite imagery project with image analysis and distributed services. My perfect job!

They had SGI machines which were state of the art at the time… I was in heaven!

But it would start 6 months from now, in the meantime, they had an ongoing flight simulator project for another company and they sent me there. That company was an EA contractor that built a cool set of games. They really took to me as a hacker and I overhauled the system repeatedly. Unfortunately, the CORBA/Satellite project was canceled and I had the option of going back to the original company that hired me or staying for a salary bump in the gaming company. I chose to stay with the people I liked until 1999 when I quit and formed my consulting company.

I formed a consulting company in 1999 and business was insane. As bad as I was at running a company you literally couldn’t lose money at that time. I consulted for well over a hundred companies and it was one of the hardest experiences, but also a serious bootcamp. Consulting is hard, you learn a lot during that time as you’re faced with the hardest problems and need to constantly prove yourself. During that time I worked on several projects and was very frustrated with Palm Pilot development. So I ported some of the Java palm pilot SDK to work on Linux… An hour after posting that to the mailing list I got a call from Sun Microsystems and shortly thereafter I was working for the company that created Java… This replaced AI as my new obsession.

At Sun I worked on several projects. DoJa which was the first Java mobile phone built for NTT DoCoMo, I was on the team that built the first Wireless Toolkit. That was the first cross-platform mobile development tool. I think it inspired a lot of what we see from tools today. I worked on many other projects at Sun working with operators, device manufacturers etc. Working on VMs, interfaces, ports, and everything. At some point, my best friend Chen Fishbein (we literally grew up as brothers one door next to the other) who was working at Sun at the time gave me a call. He said he was working on a Swing-like framework for mobile devices. I spent an hour lecturing him on how hard this is and why he shouldn’t do it…

He did it anyway and it was pretty nice. So I was brought in to help. I implemented a lot of the things we know in LWUIT today such as the EDT, invokeAndBlock, modality etc. as well as a cleanup of hierarchy and paint logic. This took off as a community project at some point being the most successful open-source mobile project from Sun Microsystems. The project was forked by many companies including Nokia etc. I inadvertently started doing community work, blogging, supporting etc. This was just stuff I did naturally… It took off and I found I had a knack for that.

In late 2011 Chen and I left Oracle (who purchased Sun Microsystems a few years prior) to form Codename One together. At Codename One I did a lot of the work building the community, writing a couple of books, the docs, blog etc. I also created a lot of videos, tutorials and courses. It still took me years to realize that what I’m doing is actually developer relations and I like it.

4. What tech are you most excited or passionate about right now and why?

I recently wrote about how Codename One nearly went bankrupt because of bad caching code and Google App Engines opacity. If we had a product like Lightrun this wouldn’t have happened.

Observability is a big deal and I don’t want to seem disparaging. It’s very valuable and complementary to tools like Lightrun. But the ability to practically debug your production, that’s a “game changer” and I’m very excited about that.

5. What tech are you most worried about right now and why?

I’ve done a lot of Node and Front End over the past couple of years. We need to support those technologies for Lightrun. Maybe it’s my deep bias as a Java/JVM guy… But those technologies are at least 10 years behind what we have today in the JVM world.

Discovery and troubleshooting seem to have taken a nosedive when compared to the existing tools and IDEs. This could be my habit/bias/familiarity talking.

6. If we gave you 10 million dollars to invest in something today, what would you invest in and why?

I would invest in Lightrun and Codename One. That’s easy but that’s also a bit of a cop-out. I obviously believe in the companies I work for. So let’s remove them from the equation and think about the things that I don’t have a vested interest in…

Ultimately, I’m a huge believer in development tools and really believe in those. I would invest in companies like Tab Nine which I love because they combine my passion for AI with my passion for development tools. Maybe in a company like Replay, I think time travel debugging is an idea that’s due to arrive so I think they have a shot.

I love IntelliJ/IDEA and pretty much all of the JetBrains products. That company is amazing and prolific. Their support for IDE plugin developers is absolutely spectacular.

Big data isn’t my field but knowing the people behind Varada I’m pretty confident that the company would be a great investment.

In recent months I’ve been working on observability and devops because I feel those skills are my weakest points, in this place I thing up9 is pretty interesting.

Finally, I’ve been using Tweet Hunter which is just really cool and bootstrapped which I love. Would totally invest in them.

7. What are you currently learning?

I’m learning DevOps and IaC. This is pretty different from what I’m used to. I think my experience in this specific niche is relatively limited and needs bolstering.

I’m a big believer in knowing everything. Not so I would actually “do” everything. E.g. I know how to use Photoshop, Sketch etc. really well. I still use designers who produce better results than I ever will. Thanks to my mastery of the tools I’m able to better communicate what I want. I can also extract the resources I need more easily from the software which saves a lot on back and forth.

I feel the same way about devops. I don’t like doing ops. But I need to understand the challenges and the tools better in order to be a more productive member of the team.

I think we often tend to silo ourselves to a niche which is bad. I also think the inverse of forcing everyone to do everything is also a bad idea. A jack of all trades is indeed a master of none.

8. What’s the best advice you’ve ever given someone?

Well, I told my children not to eat stuff that fell to the floor. I’m pretty proud of that advice and I don’t see them complaining about it. I was a consultant for over a decade but I guess you don’t mean that type of advice. More generic “life lessons” style of advice?

I think the things that work for me don’t necessarily translate well to other people. I also think one size fits all is problematic for clothing and advice…

With that being said, I advised my spouse as we met to focus on her passion and chase it at any cost. Ignore monetary concerns and “just do it”. Naturally, I had her back financially so she could afford that, this doesn’t apply to everyone. But I think she’s pretty happy with her chosen profession and it turned out really well for her.

9. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Shut up… I was very much in love with a girl at 17, I was giving her a ride home and it was pretty clear that she liked me but “not like that”. I just wouldn’t shut up. I kept talking and “lecturing” until she stopped me. I was insulted at first.

Then she qualified. “You don’t need to fill the void with talking. You can just be with someone and appreciate their company without talking.”.

I didn’t fully realize that at the time but that was a huge personality flaw with me. I tend to talk fast and I used to be a pretty terrible listener. I also covered silence with talking to avoid meaningful relationships. I credit that car ride with the fact that someone as awkward as myself was able to find a spouse and also with my success in business and engineering. My “natural” state is pretty intense. That’s just who I am. This helped me shift gears occasionally and listen. Understand people better and evolve as a human being.

Notice that this is the right advice for me. I meet timid people every day who are afraid to speak up. They should totally do the opposite and channel a bit of my energy. I often wish I knew how to help them come out of their shell.

About HackerNoon’s 2021 Noonie Awards

The annual Noonie Awards celebrate the best and brightest of the tech industry, bringing together all who are making the Internet and the world of tech what it is today. Please be sure to check out our award categories, nominate, and vote for the people and companies who you think are making the biggest impact on the tech industry today.

The 2021 Noonies are sponsored by: bybit, Dottech Domains, and Avast. Thank you so much to these sponsors who are helping us celebrate the accomplishments of all our nominees.